Ravlic lands Vulture City

Banking Day staff
Nerdier than the rest, Vulture City - the sixth book riffing off the Hayne royal commission - will be published on Wednesday.

This work by audit and assurance journalist Tom Ravlic is more of a behavioural study of the industry's problem with culture and governance, rather than a "best of" the case studies from last year's hearing, or war stories from the media frontline that helped provoke Malcolm Turnbull's government to finally greenlight the royal commission in late 2017.

Tom Ravlic, an occasional contributor to Banking Day, is the author of Vulture City: How our bankers got rich on swindles.

What makes his book different, we asked Tom yesterday.

"It is a behavioural focus upfront rather than trying to do everything. I also spend more time on certain case studies so that they can be better explored rather than skate over the issues. There is more depth in that respect," Ravlic said.

"The other thing I do is contextualise some thinking around criminology because while we have seen these recent issues there is little that is new.

"The book benefits from the fact that I have done a deep dive in the literature on financial crime.

"All parties need to perform their roles in monitoring in order to ensure that the system works well," he said.

There's a synopsis of the five other books in Money Magazine, all the product of financial journalists: Daniel Ziffer (ABC), Michael Roddan (The Australian), Annelise Nielsen (Sky News), Alan Kohler (InvestSMART, The Australian and ABC) and then the persistent Adele Ferguson, whose exposes in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald dating from 2008 helped stir the whole thing to life.

Adele's book Banking Bad is the current best-seller (as reported by Dymocks) followed by Alan's It's Your Money.

Banking Day will publish an extract from Vulture City tomorrow.

•    Vulture City (Wilkinson Publishing, $29.99)